Dunleavy's key ally on education, Bob Griffin, faces confirmation vote for state school board

The contradictions and hypocrisy of the Dunleavy administration on charter schools are embodied in the political statements and opinions of Alaska Airlines pilot Bob Griffin, the longtime Dunleavy ally who is up for legislative confirmation for a second five-year term on the state school board.

Griffin claims he supports local control of charter schools by locally elected school boards.

“Local control is paramount,” he said about charter schools during a confirmation hearing April 17.

Then he contradicted himself by supporting the Dunleavy vision to give the state school board the power to create charter schools.

The Legislature failed in March, by a single vote, to override the Dunleavy veto of an education package that did not include his charter school power grab. House Republicans have tried to resurrect the idea, but there is strong Senate opposition and support for local control.

Griffin said that allowing the governor’s appointees on the state education board to create charter schools would end the “huge asymmetric power relationship” that exists when only locally elected school boards have the power to approve charter schools, which is the current law.

Griffin said he doesn’t know how many charter schools have been rejected over the last 30 years, but “if you interview a lot of parents there’s a lot of people that have not bothered to go through the process” because it’s too difficult. They have turned to correspondence allotment programs instead. It should be easier to create charter schools, he said.

Griffin has falsely claimed there are thousands of parents in Alaska who are on waiting lists to get their kids into charter schools, echoing the misinformation spread by Education Commissioner Deena Bishop, Dunleavy and others.

“Huge waiting lists of thousands of parents who are eager to participate in Alaska's innovative and successful public charter school models are frustrated because of statutory barriers that inhibit the growth of popular public charter programs,” Griffin wrote in a personal press release he distributed in mid-March.

Griffin was a founder and co-treasurer of the Dunleavy shadow campaign in 2018. He was co-treasurer of the Stand Tall With Mike group created to oppose the Dunleavy recall.

There is no doubt that Dunleavy, Griffin and others see the creation of statewide charter schools, which would act like correspondence schools, as a way to direct more public money into private schools.

While the landmark court ruling declaring the current school allotment rules unconstitutional plays out in court, Dunleavy and Griffin remain leading advocates for pushing more public resources to private schools.

Griffin is a board member of the far-right Alaska Policy Forum, which lists him as its “senior education research fellow.” He did not mention the Alaska Policy Forum on his resume submitted to legislators, referring to his volunteer senior education research fellow position as “my other hat.”

He told the House committee that he did not know what position the Alaska Policy Forum takes on K-12 education.

The senior education research fellow knows full well that the position is that the state should spend a lot less money and have students earn higher scores on standardized tests. He shouldn’t be afraid to admit this point of view.

He makes it a habit to cherry-pick statistics and occasionally manufactures his own, mixing and matching to sell his case. He regularly misuses the state results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress as an accurate measurement of public school performance.

 “Alaska’s public schools are not underfunded–they are not run efficiently because they are a monopoly,” Griffin wrote for the Alaska Policy Forum on June 29, 2014.

Griffin wrote two months ago that Alaska schools do not need an increase in funding—a claim he has been repeating for more than a decade—schools just need to spend money in different ways that he doesn’t identify to get better results.

“While our funding is adequate, results are still disappointing,” he wrote this February.

“Alaska does not have a K-12 funding problem. We have a resource allocation problem,” he wrote in another piece in February.

At his House confirmation hearing April 17, Griffin did not repeat those claims. He said, “We have had flat funding and I support increasing K-12 funding because of that.”

Griffin has yet to have a Senate confirmation hearing, which is scheduled for Monday, April 29.

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